The Château la Fleur Morange 2006 has won a Gold at the Decanter World Wine Awards which 
were announced at the London International Wine Fair yesterday the 18th of May!
There were record entries this year with 10,983 wines entered and only 2.86% won a Gold or Regional trophy. That’s less than 320 wines from around the world!
The 2006 vintage has also been awarded the coveted Coup de Coeur in the The Hachette Guide to French Wine (Guide Hachette des Vins de France). There is only one Coup de Coeur awarded to each appellation and this is a great honour for this tiny winery.
La Fleur Morange is no stranger to the Decanter World Wine Awards – the 2007 was awarded a Bronze Medal last year at the World Wine Awards.
The wine makers at La Fleur Morange, Jean Francois and Veronique Julien have had great success with their Saint Emilion Grand Cru and their Second Wine, Mathilde de La Fleur Morange over the past couple of years and my heartfelt congratulations go out to them.
The very first vintage was only in 1999 and now 11 years later this little garagiste wine is rubbing shoulders amongst the big boys.
Last year Saint Emilion celebrated the Julien’s phenomenal 
success and La Fleur Morange’s contribution to the wines of this famous appellation.
To honour the quality of the Julien’s work and the rise of La Fleur Morange to international acclaim throughout the world’s media, the Jurade of Saint Emilion, the Mayor and the town gathered together to mark the occasion with a dinner for 250 plus in attendance.
Both these wines have been discovered by Robert Parker and Jancis Robinson and are attracting attention across the globe as the wines are released.
La Fleur Morange picked up several awards in 2009 and Robert Parker has alerted wine lovers the world over to take note as this wine is definitely a rising star (awarding the 2005 vintage a whopping 96 points!).
Jancis Robinson named La Fleur Morange her favourite wine after a blind tasting of 2005 St Emilions at Decanter magazine. Janci
s writes in her Purple Pages:
“You may never have heard of my favourite wine . . .In fact the wine I liked best of all on my day of tasting, a view shared by claret specialist Stephen Browett when we discussed what we had just been tasting, was one that I thought might be Pavie and he thought might be Ausone.”
Jancis also named the Mathilde de La Fleur Morange 2006 her wine of the week: “Mathilde de La Fleur Morange 2006 St-Émilion is the second wine of that exceptional property.
The wine is named after the daughter of Fleur Morange’s owners Jean-François and Véronique Julien, whose four acres of century-old Merlot vines in the village of St-Pey-d’Armens due east of the town of St-Émilion seem capable of such great things.
Jean-François Julie
n, who seems as precise a winemaker as he was a cabinet-maker, puts this down at least partly to the unusual complexity of the soils in their small vineyard. Claude Gros, whom I profiled recently, is the consultant oenologist.”
The soil that Jancis refers to makes La Fleur Morange unique as it is the only bit of it’s in kind in the whole of Saint Emilion! It is a combination of sand, clay and chalk over an iron oxide sub soil (crasse de fer) which is 15.7 inches (40 cm) below the surface.
This subsoil rests on top of limestone bedrock. Combined with the meticulous wine making skills of the Juliens and oenologist Claude Gros this terroir produces beautiful wines! If you are interested in trying the La Fleur Morange 2006 it is available at http://www.interestinwine.co.uk/ at £410 in bond for a dozen.
